Wait, you made me do what?
A large, darkened room, filled by an elegantly dressed audience of men and women, seated in rows. The huge screen, in front of them. The shadows it’s destined to host begin their flicker.
The first hiss of a shocked, in-drawn breath, the enlarged pupils of the eyes, the clutching at the arm of a neighbor.
“Oh, my God, I’m in this?”
The squirming starts, as every member of the audience begins to realize they’ve been part of a travesty. And then, heralded by the tittering that sweeps through the crowd, a transition comes. A hairy hand tries and fails to cover cackle. And then the horse-laugh.
And now, as unstoppable waves of hilarity sweep through the helpless audience, the director of the shadows on the screen begins to weep, his dream mocked. Soon, the big bully of a man leaves, his sight in the dark auditorium fractured by his tears.
And salvation comes in the form of his once-best and only friend, who trots out into the lobby to find the man who tried to ruin his life. In the face of the director’s incoherent lamentations concerning the treatment of his dream, this autobiographical film, he has a simple rejoinder.
“You hear that? D’you hear that? Do you think Hitchcock ever achieved that?”
As they return to the auditorium, the lights come up and the audience stands for an ovation, of their director and themselves, in a horrifyingly successful conclusion to a tremendously fore-doomed flop, for it’s the opening for the supposedly autobiographical cult classic The Room (2003), the first movie by Tommy Wiseau.
This is The Disaster Artist (2017), which is all about how mystery man Tommy Wiseau made his first movie, from his recognition that you have to be the best you can be, to the agonizing realization that his best, as an actor, would not be enough to get him in the door of any studio to make a movie, and then back up the rollercoaster again as he determines to make a movie himself. Drawing on mysterious resources and a bottomless pit of self-confidence and arrogance, that movie gets written and made, destroying relationships and many other unnameable things in the process – and, soon enough, perhaps Tommy himself.
This is the sort of movie, if you choose to go, that may chase you from the theater, as both my Arts Editor and myself agreed afterwards. There are parts that are predictably painful. But persevere.
Because it gets worse. Several times it gets worse. You’ll wonder if that was a prosthetic or a paper bag. And then it gets worse. And the predictability disappears. And all along, the WTF factor keeps going up. Because why the hell is Seth Rogen and James Franco in this movie? Why is J. J. Abrams IN this movie. I mean, What The Fuck?
In the end, this is an enormously painful, probably honest, and yet affectionate gesture from Hollywood to one of their own, for pursuing and achieving his artistic dream – and then transforming it into something else.
It’s not quite Recommended, but if you’ve seen The Room or are interested in the artistic process, or just want to see artistic madness before the warts are shaved off, this is quite the example.
